Category talk:Westrobothnian language

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See also: Category talk:Westrobothnian lemmas

Changing terminology[edit]

So there's been some recent discussion at the Beer Parlour and before that here:

I think there's a very obvious case for simply renaming everything classified as "Westrobothnian" and to do that, we need to start here. Whatever the merit is for individual entries (that's a matter of individual attestation and such), they cannot be accurately be described as "Westrobothnian". It's a neologism that has been launched by a few local activists and has no standing among either linguists or even most speakers. It's been around on the Wikiprojects for over 10 years but has just about zero traction outside the projects.

The least complicated way to deal with this in my view is to reclassify all entries as Swedish and specifically as part of the Norrland dialects. I'm thinking that we could set up something similar to what exists at Category:Regional Romansch, for example a Category:Swedish dialects with sub-categories like Category:Norrland dialects and, for example, Category:Lövånger dialect under that. So the hierarchy would work something like this:

  • Swedish
    • Norrland dialects
      • Lövånger dialect
      • Nederkalix dialect
      • Piteå dialect
    • South Swedish dialects
      • Scanian dialect
    • Svealand dialects
      • Dala dialects

Are there any other similar structures for dialects and dialect groups that could be relevant to reference?

Peter Isotalo 11:17, 30 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Seems sound, however it would be a lot of work to treat local parish dialects individually rather than trying to classify dialects as southern/northern westrobothnian, northbothnian, et c. since there are some shared aspects that might merit supergroups. 188.150.161.188 15:12, 14 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The supergroup of Norrland, Svealand and Götaland (Scania, Götland) seem pretty generalized, especially when it comes to Norrland, but I guess might be justified even though its solely a geographical classification. 188.150.161.188 15:14, 14 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I support this change. ”Westrobothnian” is merely a geographical nomer, and not a linguistic grouping. Dialectological literature rather divides Westrobothnian into a northern group and a southern group. Among the entries on Wiktionary and Wikipedia, Norrbotten dialects are also sometimes subsumed under this nomer, which doesn’t have any support whatsoever (see e.g. spela or heḻtré) – the linguistic border between the two regions is quite distinct. The proposal is more in line with how dialects are usually treated on Wiktionary, compare the division of English dialects in e.g. Category:Northern England English.
We can discuss what the division or hierarchy should be exactly. The problems raised by the IP above don’t necessarily pose a problem, since an entry can be placed further up in the hierarchy. For instance bairn is placed under ”Northern England English” and not under each subcategory to this category. --Lundgren8 (t · c) 10:00, 29 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I have asked for some help in the grease pit on how to go about dismantling and transferring the content of this this network of categories. Peter Isotalo 15:09, 16 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Language code deletion[edit]

It has been decided to delete the Westrobothnian language from the data. The discussion will likely be archived below. — SURJECTION / T / C / L / 09:40, 1 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry for being such a slowpoke but what is necessary to do now? What is this weird <! stuff in the code of entries like dœld? Do i need to use it if im gonna find any Westrobothnian stuff? And what to do with the dictionary attested north Sweedish dialectal variations? Add them into Swedish? There are also some recorded northern Swedish texts nobody mentioned yet. How to add these stuff into Swedish if they got like 4 genders and dative casus? I ain't sure if it works so good together with Swedish templates. Tollef Salemann (talk) 07:45, 2 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
<!--...--> represents a HTML comment. The content is there, but it is not visible. Uncommenting it would result in an error, as the gmq-bot language code has been deleted. As for the handling of Norrland dialectal terms, that is left to the community that edits Swedish, but I believe there were plans to subsume these entries in some way while using the correct labels. — SURJECTION / T / C / L / 08:30, 2 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

RFD discussion: January–April 2023[edit]

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for deletion (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

(NB: In the text below, the term ‘dialect’ refers to traditional linguistic varieties spoken on the Scandinavian dialect continuum.)

The category of ‘Westrobothnian’, as used on Wiktionary, refers to a language supposedly spoken in the Swedish historical province of Westrobothnia (corresponding to present-day Västerbotten and Norrbotten). However, the entire concept of such a language lacks any kind of basis, and has been largely fabricated by a handful of internet hobbyists, who attempt to unilaterally subsume multiple distinct dialects into a cohesive ‘Westrobothnian’ grouping. This grouping is not recognized either by linguists or by the speakers of the affected dialects. In fact, there is hardly any mention of it anywhere that cannot be traced back to the few hobbyists mentioned above.

Wiktionary and Wikipedia appear to have been used in particular as sandboxes for the purpose of pushing the concept of a ‘Westrobothnian’ language, including attempts to introduce homemade orthographies. Myself, lundgren8 and Armeix have been working on trying to clean up this issue on English Wikipedia, which has resulted in expanding the article w:Norrland dialects and redirecting ‘w:Westrobothnian’ to it. We have also engaged in discussion regarding the issue and how to fix it on Wiktionary:

Our conclusion is that the category ‘Westrobothnian’ is actively misleading and has to be deleted. The concept goes against both popular usage among speakers and linguistic research. Allowing users to apply ‘Westrobothnian’ to entries makes it more, not less, difficult to include entries for local dialects.

Regarding individual entries, we believe large-scale deletion is motivated. Due to the way information from different dialects has been blended together and presented as a single variety, cleanup in bulk is not feasible. Entries have to be examined on a case-by-case basis, which would also have to include doing source checkups for each entry, which is a major undertaking for a category that contains c. 3000 lemmas. We welcome suggestions, but overall, we believe that most entries under the Westrobothnian heading might not be worth keeping at all.

Peter Isotalo 10:46, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
--Lundgren8 (t · c) 10:55, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
--Armeix (talk) 15:36, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I see, the term Westrobothnian is scarce even in attestation in English, and I don’t see any mention of it as a language, but I would expect Germanists witter about it if it were a distinct language. This is good circumstantial evidence if man lacks command of Swedish. Fay Freak (talk) 01:57, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
If consensus develops for deletion, I can volunteer to do the bot job. I don't think indiscriminate deletion to the aether is what we want, but rather moving them somewhere where they can be checked and possibly re-added back wherever they belong. I don't know if there is any kind of precedent for this, though. — SURJECTION / T / C / L / 09:04, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Bot assistance would be greatly appreciated!
If the issue of deleting entries is considered tricky, we should at least make sure to get rid of the made-up language category. There's a strong case for questioning the validity of individual entries written by users who have consistently misrepresented sources, but if we want to keep them for now, they could be uncategorized until we find a better solution. Or we could replace them all with a recognized dialect grouping of Swedish. In this case, I believe "Norrland dialects" (Swedish: norrländska mål) is the appropriate option. It covers a much broader geographical area than Västerbotten, but at least it's a term that is actually widely used and recognized.
Peter Isotalo 09:55, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
There is some precedent to this in Wiktionary. We used to have a "Kurdish" language, when there clearly is no such single language. Consensus developed to change Kurdish to a family and implement distinct Northern Kurdish, Central Kurdish and Southern Kurdish languages. I was able to split the Kurdish lemmas into Northern and Central largely by script, with some special-casing with the help of native speakers; Northern Kurdish is generally written in Latin script while Central and Southern Kurdish are generally written in Arabic script (there were very few Southern Kurdish lemmas). However, this did not involve so much deliberate POV pushing as is apparently going on with Westrobothnian. I am in agreement with Surjection that we should move the lemmas to somewhere (e.g. within the Appendix space) rather than just deleting them outright. Benwing2 (talk) 04:00, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure I'd be keen on moving them to the appendix space. If we're saying they aren't Westrobothnian, then presumably we're still saying they're part of some language we have as an L2. Theknightwho (talk) 04:09, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Theknightwho Maybe, maybe not; I'd like one of the above three users to comment but it's at least possible a lot of the terms are semi-made-up or are taken randomly from one or another dialect and then phonetically modified to make them conform to some decreed standardization. That is, a given term may not accurately represent any Swedish dialect (that would be the L2 presumably), and the collection of terms may be inconsistently representing multiple dialects. Someone with knowledge of Swedish dialects would have to go through the terms one by one; in the meantime IMO it's best to get them out of the mainspace. Benwing2 (talk) 07:31, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
If we consider the position of North Germanic dialectology as well as Sweden’s official language policy, the language is Swedish. The subcategorization is a more complex matter; I would propose putting the name of the relevant traditional parish, local dialect group or province in combination with the term 'traditional', to make clear that this concerns a traditional dialect on the Scandinavian continuum and not a regional dialect of standard Swedish. A word could thus be specified with e.g. "(Lövånger, traditional)", "(northern Västerbotten, traditional)" or "(Västerbotten, traditional)".
However, this brings us to the issue of the actual entries. As previously stated, most entries blend information about several dialects into a streamlined form that is often muddled with homemade spellings and original research and that lacks proper sourcing. It is thus impossible to simply relabel such entries, as they would have to be completely remade on a one-by-one basis. As this is the case, we end up with a situation where entries are only presentable if they are remade from scratch, which defeats the entire purpose of saving them. This is the basis for our original proposition of simply deleting them all.
To show an example of the problem, here is a brief list of selected issues from the very problematic entry augʼ:
  • The spelling ⟨aug’⟩ is homemade and not used in any published source. It is presumably supposed to be supradialectal, and does not mirror the pronunciation in any single dialect (on the basis of Swedish orthography, which is conventional in the region).
  • Several alternative forms of the word are given, but there is no information of where these are used. Many of them are written in a different homemade orthography that instead appears to mirror phonetic transcription.
  • The pronunciation for Umeå is given, but this is not in any of the sources.
  • The Burträsk-only pronunciation is altered from the one given in the source. The source also calls it “older and pejorative”, which is not mentioned in the article.
  • The examples—all written in the homemade orthography—are not found in any of the sources.
To show the spectrum of problematic entries, this can be contrasted with the less (but still) problematic entry kräon. This entry is written using a conventional spelling that reflects the pronunciation well (although the provided IPA is not optimal). The form kräon is, however, unique to the Överkalix dialect, which is not mentioned anywhere, and there is no source to be found. Armeix (talk) 20:06, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Armeix, Lundgren and I believe we have some pretty watertight arguments for deleting the category as simply being made up. Unless someone shows confirmation that "Westrobothnian" is a valid category (and a separate) language, I see no reason for not getting rid of it as a way of classifying entries.
Peter Isotalo 19:25, 29 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Peter Isotalo Let's let this deletion request wait out its month (at least), then we can proceed.
On the topic of what you've written above, I concur with Benwing and Surjection in that I'm not sure outright deletion is the best route. I don't see anyone arguing that these words are hoaxes that don't exist, while I am seeing the suggestion that they should be converted to dialectal Swedish terms using widely accepted Swedish orthographic practices. Therefore, it makes sense to convert these entries to some kind of temporary appendix so that they can be gone through one by one, manually, and any useful content salvaged and moved to a relevant Swedish entry before outright deletion. This, that and the other (talk) 02:56, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
By ”wait out its month”, do you mean sit tight until February 18th when the RfD is one month old? Until then it would be nice to continue the discussion and reach some sort of consensus on how to proceed. If we decide to move the entries before outright deletion, where should they be moved, and how temporary should the appendices (or perhaps sandboxes?) be? --Lundgren8 (t · c) 16:07, 8 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
As I recall being shown in the prior discussions (most linked above), "Westrobothnian" does indeed appear to not exist as a recognized language (it is reminiscent of the scandal with made-up Scots on Wikipedia), so the language should be removed. I am sceptical that many of the words would meet the higher CFI bar for (dialectal) Swedish, three uses instead of one, but have no objection to appendicizing them all and checking them if someone is willing to do that work rather than outright deleting them. - -sche (discuss) 19:27, 15 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
But is it possible to change the category status of Westrobothnian into a dialect without to remove all the words? And why not to do the same splitting of Swedish into dialectal categorys as it was done with Category:Norwegian Nynorsk dialectal terms? And what to do with Elfdalian, Jamtish (gmq-jmk) or Scanian (gmq-scy)? The Elfdalian language got recognition from EU, but the others ain't recognized not at all as far i know. In the other hand, if Westhrobotnian, Jamtish and Scanian have a language-like status in Wiktionary, the Norwegian dialects must have it as well by the same reasons. But it's gonna be weird, b'cause the English variations are not listed as separate languages (at least, I ain't see no American Language here). Dont get me wrong, i'll be happy if one day the Westrobothnian Swedish or American English will get an official recognition as languages, but per now it is not the situation. So i think that the removal of Westrobothnian as a separate language is kinda obvious thing to do, but i'm not sure how ya'll think to do it without to remove the words and without to touch the other Scandinavian language varietyes. Tollef Salemann (talk) 12:42, 26 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Peter Isotalo @Surjection @Lundgren8 @-sche @Armeix @Benwing2 @Theknightwho As I see it, there are three ways we could proceed here:
  1. Outright deletion of the Westrobothnian entries. As I said above, there is no suggestion that the words are hoaxes, so this seems counterproductive.
  2. Mass-changing the Westrobothnian entries to Swedish entries with the addition of appropriate context labels (and, consequently, dialect categories). The main problem with this is that the entry titles do not correspond to the orthography expected for Swedish entries; they need to be moved. It would be misleading to present these entries under the "Swedish" label, even if only temporarily. A secondary concern is that the entries have quality issues, as identified by Armeix above, and it sounds like they would benefit from a manual audit.
  3. Moving the Westrobothnian entries to subpages of the form Appendix:Västerbotten Swedish/... and tag them with a cleanup template. Editors will go through them and manually move the contents to the corresponding Swedish entry. It is a lot of work that may be easily forgotten about and never get done.
Thoughts? This, that and the other (talk) 11:15, 2 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
We shouldn't just mass-convert them to Swedish, because in the past a lot of them have been deleted for failing RFV (Category talk:Westrobothnian lemmas); between the lect apparently not existing (as a recognized linguistic unit, unified within Westrobothnia yet distinct from other regions), the orthography apparently being invented Scottish-Wikipedia-style, and the words failing RFV, I wouldn't object to deletion, but a conservative approach would be to put them in some appendix or (if we don't want to give them the credibility of an appendix) the creator's userspace, and then if people do the work of checking them, cool, and if not, meh, we're NOTPAPER and there's NODEADLINE. - -sche (discuss) 22:02, 2 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I'm in favor of moving all entries to an appendix and I agree with -sche that potential difficulties in verifying the entries is not a reason to shy away from this alternative. In my view, it's kinda important that we get rid of both the category and the invented language status since they are clearly misleading.
Peter Isotalo 10:42, 5 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
To me, deletion still seems like the most suitable course of action. Moving them to Swedish would (partly) resolve the issue of classification but not that of misinformation. Moving them to an appendix is acceptable but not preferable, in my view. The entries are rife with misinformation and created with a clear POV-pushing agenda. For any serious editor who wanted to add entries for the actually recognized dialects in question, it would be much easier to do so from scratch, than to be forced to sift through and fact check all the current entries. (A secondary question is what an appendix should be called. Using either ‘Westrobothnian’ or ‘Västerbotten Swedish’ is misleading and gives a false sense of legitimacy, in my opinion.) Armeix (talk) 11:37, 5 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I would prefer the appendix option. To sidestep the above issue, it could be called "Appendix:Westrobothnian cleanup/" or "Appendix:Westrobothnian archive/", with an appropriate infobox added to the top of every page to explain the situation. Deletion would mean losing possibly large amounts of content that could be in some way recoverable. — SURJECTION / T / C / L / 11:45, 5 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I am, like Armeix, slightly hesitant of the appendix solution. The reason is that appendices are widely used on Wiktionary for legitimate varieties, perhaps most notably proto-languages, so moving the entries to an appendix would not strip them of their legitimacy, which is something we want to do. I would prefer moving them to sandbox subpages or something along those lines, but I acknowledge that the appendix solution is still better than keeping them in the main namespace. --Lundgren8 (t · c) 15:32, 7 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Can we move towards a solution here? From what I can tell, we have consensus that Westrobothnian is not a valid categorization. No one has showed up claiming WB is relevant to keep and from what I've seen from available sources, any such claims will have to be based on original research or just personal opinion.
We have some leaning towards outright deletion and others favoring moving all entries to appendix space. From what I can tell, everyone is at a minimum in favor of an appendix solution.
My concrete suggestion is that we move all content under "Westrobothnian" to appendix space and delete the category, including the language tag. I don't know exactly how appendix space works, but we could write a brief instruction that anyone wanting to salvage content from the appendix has to do so under categories that are based on actual linguistic research.
Peter Isotalo 11:41, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I am in favor of the appendix solution if it comes with a disclaimer that it is not, unlike certain other varieties in the Appendix space, a valid category. A proposal by Surjection above was that this could be done by including ”clean-up” in the title and/or with a template at the top of each entry that could link to said instruction Peter Isotalo mentioned above. --Lundgren8 (t · c) 15:53, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
If there are no major objections by the end of this month, I'll start implementing the move into the appendix. — SURJECTION / T / C / L / 16:43, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
FYI, sv.wikt has sv:Kategori:Bottniska. — SURJECTION / T / C / L / 16:56, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Let's hope sv.wikt deals with that category too, because it's every bit as problematic as this one. Either way, it's a matter for sv.wikt users to decide.
Peter Isotalo 19:35, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Surjection without seeing your comment above, I made Wiktionary:Todo/Westrobothnian cleanup as a compromise between an appendix and outright deletion. Do you think this obviates the need for the appendix? In hindsight I could have made the pages a bit shorter, but I can't be bothered to put any more effort in.
. This, that and the other (talk) 12:35, 24 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
If every Westrobothnian entry is included, then it should do fine and no appendix will be needed. My bot run will probably comment out any descendants and remove any translations so that hopefully the language code itself can be retired. I can actually make my bot update these pages as well. — SURJECTION / T / C / L / 12:39, 24 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Every entry containing ==Westrobothnian== in the source code was identified, totalling 2909 entries. This Petscan query finds 2908 Westrobothnian entries - presumably one was deleted since the last dump? This, that and the other (talk) 01:15, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I will now proceed with the process - all extant Westrobothnian entries will be moved to subpages of Wiktionary:Todo/Westrobothnian cleanup. Descendants and cognates will be commented out, while translations will be removed. Once complete, the language code will be removed from language data. Comments about this process can be addressed to me. — SURJECTION / T / C / L / 09:38, 1 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The deletion of the language code turned up several entries where User:ASkyr added Alternative forms sections to Old Norse entries containing Westrobothnian terms as alternative forms. I have deleted all of these, including the ones that were commented out- even if you believe in Westrobothnian, there's simply no way that it can be considered part of Old Norse. It would probably be a good idea to check this editor's other edits. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:09, 1 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I have not knowingly added any Westrobothnian forms, only a few Old Norse u/o-alternates, from the Äldre u ock o i kort stavelse i mellersta Norrland book. If they have linked to Westrobothnian, that was unintenional. ASkyr (talk) 23:20, 1 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@ASkyr: check your contributions for March 16, 2021. Most of them use the "gmq-bot" language code for Westrobothnian instead of the "non" code for Old Norse. If you're absolutely sure that the deleted alternative forms are correct Old Norse, by all means add them back with the correct language code. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:36, 1 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Good work Surjection. Just one Q: now when the category is deleted, is there any reason for commenting out descendants and cognates rather than removing them completely? --Lundgren8 (t · c) 05:54, 3 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I kept them in case there is salvageable content of some kind. The intention was to let them be reviewed and removed if there's nothing worth keeping. I did actually remove some of them outright if they were mentioned in entries for languages outside of Germanic/Scandinavian in particular. — SURJECTION / T / C / L / 05:57, 3 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]


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